Improving the maintenance, the cleanliness and the sanitation features of conventional toilets has been the subject of many efforts to provide improved toilet seats, toilet bowls and means for connecting them. It has been found that cleaning and sanitizing is complicated by the intricacies of hinge-like interconnections between the pivoted seat ring and the flange of a toilet bowl and by the inconvenient location and the often unsavory condition thereof. In many installations the problems are aggravated by the hinge-like interconnection of a separate seat cover mounted above the seat for independent rotation relative thereto. Access to the area around those interconnections is difficult and inconvenient and maintenance in that area is often distasteful. Partial solutions to these problems have been suggested by many.
One early effort to gain accessibility to the seat, bowl flange and the mounting area to facilitate maintenance is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,055,015. Bushings are bolted in the bowl flange apertures and a post extends from the seat through the bushing to connect the seat to the bowl flange. Spring arms on the posts engage the bushings to releasably hold the seat in place on the flange. The seat is to be pulled upwardly and totally removed for maintenance. This approach presents additional problems for maintenance personnel. Typically the unsanitary separated seat assembly must be placed on a remote surface for cleaning and sanitizing. This results in excessive handling and subjects additional surface areas to contamination. The open apertures in the flange bushing will collect debris and cleaning materials that are difficult to remove. Moreover, a configuration relying on total separation of the seat assembly from the toilet bowl will encourage vandalism and theft, especially in commercial applications.
Many years later another approach to the same problems was shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,326,307. In that approach a bolt is secured in each flange aperture with a mounting ball on the bolt above the flange of a residential toilet. This does seal the apertures in the flange against contamination. The seat is supported on each flange ball by a mating hinged fastener. The fastener has a tab and side walls enclosing a slotted socket that engages the associated ball. For maintenance the seat must be pulled from the flange by lifting the tabs and separating the sockets from the balls. Such arrangements also present the problems of excessive handling of the unsanitary detached seat, or seat and cover assembly, and placing it on some remote surface for cleaning and sanitizing. Such an approach using releasable fasteners creates additional new problems. The protruding flange ball creates new problems in bowl flange maintenance and the complex exposed fastener with a tab and socket present additional difficulties in removing and maintaining the seat. Other arrangements for detachment and remote storage are found in the prior art for residential type toilet seats having two hinges, releasably connected to a device secured to the bowl flange. With these prior approaches additional difficulties would be encountered in mounting commercial and traditional toilet seat arrangements.